France may be riven by strikes, riots and youth unemployment, but it is a European model in one very important economic category: broadband connectivity.

The country deregulated its telecoms market years ago, forcing the incumbent, France Telecom, to open its lines to competitors. As a result, offers for 24-megabits-per-second broadband connections, with TV and voice calls included, all for €30 (£21.50) per month, abound all over Paris, the suburbs and beyond.

European entrepreneurs, consumers, and now regulators and lawmakers, look on in envy. Britons, for one, would like a French connection. Instead, they plod along on a last-generation network providing access speeds at the bottom of the European league table. The average Briton connects to the net at a speed of less than 3Mbps, a relative crawl.

A summit convened this week by Steven Timms, the competitiveness minister, attempted to address this. Unless the country dramatically upgrades its broadband connections to next-generation networks, the roll-out of video-on-demand services, not to mention web TV services like the joint venture announced yesterday by the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, will be meaningless investments. And telecoms and media companies know it.

This meeting of the minds among telecoms and media could very well lead to another piece of French technological ingenuity being co-opted. Now that France has a superfast, next-generation network in place, it wants to ensure its citizens are using it responsibly.

As a result, the French Government last week introduced a new anti-piracy measure that some say could herald the end of file-sharing as we know it. Under the plan, ISPs would hand over the details of the biggest users of file-sharing networks to an enforcement body. The new P2P police force would then issue cease and desist warnings to the offending downloaders. If unheeded, they’d be disconnected.

What makes this plan a landmark in the battle against piracy is that the telecoms industry has signed on. Historically, ISPs everywhere strongly objected to any form of enforcement that required them to turn over their customers to the attorneys of various copyright holders. Under the French plan, they must.

Similar discussions are being held elsewhere, including in Britain, between media outfits and telecoms companies to develop a workable plan to minimise piracy and give legitimate, paid download services a fighting chance. There is a lot more sympathy nowadays to curtailing rampant illegal downloads than there was just 18 months ago.

For starters, the amount of data traffic produced by so many video games, music tracks and movies being swapped between complete strangers is reaching absurd levels. According to the most recent survey, anywhere between 50 per cent and 95 per cent of all net traffic, depending on the region and time of day, is in the form of peer-to peer file-sharing traffic.

This is hardly a victimless crime. For every teenager on your street who traffics in gigabytes of free data, the slower the connection there is for everybody else along that line. My 20Mbps connection slows to a crawl just about every Sunday evening. There are plenty of plausible explanations for service slowdowns, but these scheduled traffic snarls are so regular that I am determined to start knocking on doors in my neighbourhood and taking down names and numbers of suspected offenders. As long as the slowdowns persist, I will not be subscribing to any IPTV or VOD services as I have no faith my network can handle the load of a legitimate download request.

Scenarios like this play out from market to market every day. For the vast majority of us, the capacity of the network running next to our home cannot reliably handle legitimate net TV or movie download services. Much of that blame should go to our telecoms and cable providers for being slow to upgrade. Another hunk of blame should go to our neighbours for clogging the lines with needless junk.

The ISPs have been loath to go after file-sharers in the past, knowing that a higher download speed is one of the primary reasons that customers invest in broadband. But left unchecked, and this steadily swelling traffic in pirated material is beginning to anger more than the music and movie industry. It is this realisation that could produce a breakthrough on how to limit digital piracy, some observers think.

Struan Robertson, Senior Associate at the law firm Pinsent Masons, who specialises in digital intellectual property, says the French decision last week shows there is important middle ground being staked out between telcos and copyright holders. And while there is no deal as of yet, the two sides do agree on one thing: they’d prefer to work out an accord together rather than deal with lawmakers.

“What we are seeing in France is industry self-regulation,” Mr Robertson says. “There now exists an incentive for ISPs to negotiate with the entertainment industry, if only to minimise the risk of new legislation being introduced.”

If it happens, and it’s looking increasingly likely, we’ll have the French to thank for it.

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Bernhard Warner, a freelance journalist and media consultant, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com